Unofficial news and tips about Google

January 27, 2008

Share Almost Any Blog Post in Google Reader

Google Reader's sharing feature is very cool, but it's limited to your subscriptions. If you find an interesting post and you want to share it with your friends without subscribing to the feed, Google Reader is not very helpful. On a closer look, you'll notice that Google Reader lets you preview any feed without subscribing to it if you go to this page:

http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/FEED_URL

But it's not that easy to find the feed and build that URL every time you want to share a post. And even if you do that, you'll still have to find the post.

So I created a bookmarklet that automates the process: it finds the feed and creates a different URL that tells Google Reader to search for the page's title in that feed. Hopefully, the first result is the page you want to share.

Here's how to add the bookmarklet to your browser (because of a Google Reader bug, this doesn't work in Opera and Safari):

1. Make sure the link toolbar is visible in your browser. You can enable it if you go to the View menu in your browser, click on Toolbars and check:* Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox* Links in Internet Explorer

2. Don't click on the link below! For Firefox, right-click on the link, select "Bookmark this Link" and choose "Bookmarks Toolbar" from the dropdown. For Internet Explorer, right-click on the link, select "Add to Favorites", ignore the security warning and choose "Links" from the list of folders.

Note that you'll be able to share pages only from sites that have feeds and only if you go to the blog post, not to the blog's homepage. If the post is very recent, it's likely that Google Reader didn't index it yet. If the page's title is not identical to the post's title, select the title before clicking on the bookmarklet.

Credits: the bookmarklet contains code from Google Reader's subscription bookmarklet; based on a idea by Louis Gray.

41 comments:

Install Google Notebook Firefox extension. Create a notebook and make it shared, then subscribe it to your Google Reader. Then when you see something worth it, add it to that notebook. It will then (eventually) appear in the feed of notebook and you'll be able to share it.

Downside is that it's kinda slow (you're probably the only one subscribed to that notebook and GReader will fetch that feed once in 3hours or so).

The upside is that Notebook mostly preserves typesetting AND it has thumbnails of images. Also you can attach whatever commentary you have about that piece of shared content (Notebook native functionality).

@psi-:At some point, I wanted to post this as a way to share anything in Google Reader, but the main problem is that you have to remember to actually share the item in 3 hours or more. It's also difficult to select the entire content of a post.

You can do something similar if you have Lifehacker's Better GReader Firefox extension. One of the options is "Smart Subscribe" which gives you an RSS icon for any page with a feed. When you click the icon on a page you are not subscribed to, you are taken to the preview in Google Reader. You can then share it (SHIFT+S) just like any feed you are subscribed to. Pretty slick.

Yes, Jason, the idea is similar. This bookmarklet has the advantage that you can easily share old posts without doing too much work. If you preview the feed, you'll only see the recent posts and it's difficult to find a post from June 2007, for example.

I can't actually get it to work; the bookmarklet brings me into google reader but it does a search for the the title of the blog post and shows the results; it does NOT put anything in the shared section of greader.

@hewhocutsdown:You have accurately described what the bookmarklet does. It's not very difficult to imagine that the bookmarklet can't add the post to your shared items so you have to do that. The bookmarklet only brings the post in Google Reader's interface: click on its title and you'll be able to see the option to share it, the same as you share any other post in Google Reader.

The problem with the first post is that the site lists www.modernself.com/feed as the RSS feed, even if it redirects to a feed hosted at FeedBurner. The first post indexed by Google Reader is from March 13 and the post you've mention is from February, so it can't find it. The post is indexed for the FeedBurner feed (feeds.feedburner.com/modernself).

For the second post, the problem is similar: the first post indexed by Google Reader from that feed is from July 2007, while the post is from March.

Google Reader only indexes feeds if they have at least one subscriber and keeps those posts in a database. This bookmarklet queries the database because you can only share posts Google Reader is aware of.

This is probably a silly question, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to get my bookmarklets toolbar next to the main menu stuff (File, Edit, Etc.) like you have in that picture. This is so far the only bookmarklet that I've seen (plz do link if there's a place with more goodies like this) so I hate having a whole extra toolbar of mostly blank space.

Great idea. But actually I can't share this very post. :( It returns:> "Search for Share Almost Any Blog Post in Google Reader" has no items.

Also I'm trying to add some posts (e.g. the last post from your blog) and Google Reader finds a post but there is no bottom bar as in your screenshot (with "Add star", "Share" links). Google Reader's functionality has changed?

> Note that you'll be able to share pages only from sites that have feeds and only if you go to the blog post, not to the blog's homepage.Actually I can do it. E.g.:- I load a homepage of some LiveJournal's blog;- I *select* a title of a post in a browser;- I click "Share in Google Reader" bookmark.

> The first post indexed by Google Reader is from March 13 and the post you've mention is from February, so it can't find it.How do you know when Google Reader indexed a first post?

I still can't get it to work and I reloaded the bookmarklet fromhttp://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/04/download-youtube-videos-as-mp4-files.html can anybody confirm 1 way or another if it's still broke / disbled / re-named variables whatever ??? thx

same. got the updated bookmarklet and still can't get it to work. I too use it for downloading videos for the classroom because YouTube is blocked at many public schools. I appreciate the advice and tips.